Google Is Taking a Profoundly New Direction, Says One of its Top Execs

By Christopher Mims

August 1, 2013

Last week, after the Nexus 7 launch event in San Francisco, Sundar Pichai of Google, head of both the Android and Chrome teams, dropped a particularly interesting aside into one of his comments to the assembled press: “Our goal is to put computing everywhere.”

That’s a subtle but important additional goal for a company that is explicitly built to “organize the world’s information.” It indicates, among other things, that creating hardware, or at least partnering with companies that do, is now an essential part of gathering, processing and distributing that information.

In other words, Google is a company that is already well aware that to survive the coming decade, it must outgrow the web.

Multiplying the number of microchips in our lives

Pichai was answering a question about whether or not Google would ever create a super-phone that could replace a desktop PC, like Ubuntu’s Edge. And it was clear from his answer, not to mention the presentation that had just concluded, which included Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet and the Chromecast smart television device, that Google is pushing in the opposite direction: getting microprocessors into any place they might possibly be useful.

Google CEO Larry Page, who has made great strides in recent years in terms of focusing Google on just a handful of core projects, is clearly also pushing for the company to move further into making hardware.